Former Aston Villa striker Gabby Agbonlahor has claimed that Rangers were interested in signing him – but he was determined to stay put in Birmingham.

The 36-year-old, now retired and working as a pundit, appeared on talkSPORT where he explained why he wasn’t keen on a move to Govan in the summer of 2016.

Villa had just been relegated from the Premier League and Mark Warburton had guided Rangers to the top flight in Scotland but Agbonlahor insists that he never considered a move to Glasgow.

The lifelong Aston Villa fan explained: “The season we got relegated I got myself so fit in the summer. I wanted to get the club back up in the next season.

“I’d done a whole pre-season with the team and was looking forward to the start of the season and two days before the opening game in the Championship, [manager Roberto] Di Matteo calls me into his office. I thought he was going to say, ‘I want you to play here’, but he said, ‘I want you to leave’.

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“I was confused. I thought, ‘leave where?’ because I’d been there since I was 12 so it didn’t make sense. He was like, ‘yeah, it’s not going to work, I think you should go. Rangers and Reading are interested’, but I was like ‘I’m not going to Rangers or Reading’.

“I said, ‘I’m here, use me or don’t use me, but I’m here’. I told the chief executive that, so it was kind of ‘if you don’t want to use me, I’ll still be here because it’s my club.’

“I was part of the reason we got relegated because I was part of the squad and I think Di Matteo lasted 10 or 15 games. Even when you speak to players who were under him at Chelsea they say that the players they had won it [the Champions League], not the manager. So even for them he wasn’t popular at all.”

Glasgow Times:

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